WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:14.720 This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3753 for Wednesday the 21st of December 2022. 00:14.720 --> 00:19.720 Today's show is entitled, Some thoughts on numerous needs. 00:19.720 --> 00:24.480 It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 12 minutes long. 00:24.480 --> 00:27.320 It carries an explicit flag. 00:27.320 --> 00:40.840 This summary is aka Alphanumeric acronyms, Alphanumeric abbreviations, or numerical contractions. 00:40.840 --> 00:45.200 Hello everybody, this is Dave Morris for Hacker Public Radio. 00:45.200 --> 00:46.200 Welcome. 00:46.200 --> 00:51.320 I'm going to do a quick show today, I hope it's quick anyway. 00:51.320 --> 00:56.320 We're getting very low on show, so please step up if you can. 00:56.320 --> 01:03.840 This one is about numeronyms, the word I discovered recently, and I've called it some 01:03.840 --> 01:08.720 thoughts on numeronyms, I'll explain what they are in a minute. 01:08.720 --> 01:17.200 So what prompted this was a discussion with Mike Ray about accessibility, and he was 01:17.200 --> 01:25.680 using the term A11Y, which we all were many of us were puzzled by, I certainly was. 01:25.680 --> 01:28.960 We're pronouncing Ali and things of that sort. 01:28.960 --> 01:36.320 So I've been wondering about these, these are built from, these are the numeronyms, and 01:36.320 --> 01:41.000 they're built from the first letter of the word followed by a number and the last letter, 01:41.000 --> 01:46.200 where the number represents the count of letters between the start and end. 01:46.200 --> 01:54.080 So accessibility is A11Y, but I found this A11Y thing very, very clunky, it's much easier 01:54.080 --> 01:58.000 to say accessibility than it is to say A11Y. 01:58.000 --> 02:07.040 Looked it up, just recently, found the Wikipedia article, and it is a say, it's called a numeronym, 02:07.040 --> 02:09.280 so a name with a number in it. 02:09.280 --> 02:18.120 They may be referred to as alpha numeric acronyms, or alpha numeric abbreviations, or numerical 02:18.120 --> 02:19.120 contractions. 02:19.120 --> 02:26.880 See, all of those being contractually, the Wikipedia points out that these types of abbreviations 02:26.880 --> 02:34.720 are almost always used referred to their computing sense, so G11N for globalization, and that's 02:34.720 --> 02:39.320 in the context of computing, not in the general context. 02:39.320 --> 02:47.200 Anyway, this thing, this abbreviation method, jarred with me a little bit, and it's 02:47.200 --> 02:54.960 simply thinking, uh, fully sympathize with the motivation behind using A11Y to mean accessibility. 02:54.960 --> 03:01.000 I do find it odd and counterintuitive, often farmers are pondering the acceptability of 03:01.000 --> 03:05.440 this type of abbreviation, and in other words, in common English fit patterns like this, 03:05.440 --> 03:06.440 I wonder. 03:06.440 --> 03:13.400 Quite a few I would expect, how does this affect the admissibility of such abbreviations? 03:13.400 --> 03:18.400 Not only they eventually strange to my simple brain, but I find them to be aesthetically 03:18.400 --> 03:23.120 displeasing, my experiments with the standard Linux dictionary looking for words that fit 03:23.120 --> 03:31.480 this pattern, I find firmatively supportive of this view, I described this experiment later. 03:31.480 --> 03:35.400 Algebraically, it has to be expected there are many dictionary words of 13 characters 03:35.400 --> 03:40.640 which start with A, and then with Y, looking at them allegorically, such numeronyms can 03:40.640 --> 03:46.640 be a little meaning, except in very limited context, since the motivation seems to be 03:46.640 --> 03:50.240 to reduce the need to type long words. 03:50.240 --> 03:55.440 Alternatively, if they were accepted by data entries after an expanded automatically, better 03:55.440 --> 04:01.760 case could be made for a clickability, but only one word could be assigned to a numeronym. 04:01.760 --> 04:07.080 In my mind, there's a certain artificiality in the use of these abbreviations. 04:07.080 --> 04:12.640 So you might wonder what I was going on about in the last bit, strange writing, but in 04:12.640 --> 04:13.640 6th. 04:13.640 --> 04:18.840 This is my admittedly small joke to try and use as many of the words that match the 04:18.840 --> 04:25.000 A11Y pattern, which I made total sense, so there was a certain element of sense. 04:25.000 --> 04:32.040 So I've transformed that paragraph and put A11Y in all the cases and I'm not going to 04:32.040 --> 04:37.040 read them out, maybe I should have done, but I don't think I want to, but you can 04:37.040 --> 04:38.040 look at it. 04:38.040 --> 04:41.800 You send the notes and you can see what it looks like. 04:41.800 --> 04:47.440 So being a computer programmer and enjoying writing in Bash, I had to write Bash script 04:47.440 --> 04:49.560 to do some of this stuff. 04:49.560 --> 04:58.320 So I've given an example, it's just a three line thing, which basically a while loop. 04:58.320 --> 05:05.040 And what it does is it scans the file, it uses shared tick words, and picks out words 05:05.040 --> 05:08.040 which match the A11Y pattern. 05:08.040 --> 05:14.800 In other words, they need to start with an A and have 11 letters after that and then 05:14.800 --> 05:16.800 a Y and then that's it. 05:16.800 --> 05:23.560 So the little script, which is actually just a command line, the Utopian one line, but 05:23.560 --> 05:24.560 I've laid it out. 05:24.560 --> 05:25.960 So it's easier to read. 05:25.960 --> 05:30.720 It writes the word that it's found and the numeranum that's generated from it, which 05:30.720 --> 05:35.360 it compute, so it's unnecessary in this case because they all generate the same numeranum. 05:35.360 --> 05:39.120 I did this way because I want to apply the algorithm to other words. 05:39.120 --> 05:48.840 There's a process substitution, which uses grep to scan the user share, ticked words 05:48.840 --> 05:55.160 file, and it actually removes all instances or it doesn't return in the instances that 05:55.160 --> 06:00.880 end in a poster of the S. It seems to be quite a lot of them there, but I've said this 06:00.880 --> 06:02.760 before, not quite sure why. 06:02.760 --> 06:09.000 Then it pipes that result to another grep, which looks for this pattern of A followed 06:09.000 --> 06:18.000 by 11 letters and a Y, and that is being fed into a while loop, which reads into a variable 06:18.000 --> 06:23.840 called word, and then the contents of word printed out using print F, and then the first 06:23.840 --> 06:29.960 letter of that word, the number, the count of the letters in the word minus 2, and then 06:29.960 --> 06:41.640 the final letter of the word, and this all uses bashes, quite neat, character, stream manipulation 06:41.640 --> 06:46.840 features, and also the ability to count the length of A of a word. 06:46.840 --> 06:53.520 So I also wrote one, which looks for all words, which are 8 to 20 letters long, 06:53.520 --> 07:01.680 6, 20 of those at random, and then applies this same numeranim algorithm, and it's pretty 07:01.680 --> 07:08.640 similar except that the process substitution at the end is, it's like different, it's 07:08.640 --> 07:17.640 looking for words of 8 to 20 characters in length, and it uses the shuff command to get 07:17.640 --> 07:25.000 a random selection of 20 out of this line. I've used this trick in loads of my bash episodes, 07:25.000 --> 07:32.960 so nothing new here really. I give an example of some of the words, non-political turns 07:32.960 --> 07:43.960 out to be N10L, and optimizations is 11S, and so on, you know, I have fun with this if you 07:43.960 --> 07:48.520 find it amusing, it muses me, so that's why I did that. So I'm researching for this episode, 07:48.520 --> 07:56.160 I came out upon an extremely long word, which I found on Wikipedia, and it's a fake word, 07:56.160 --> 08:02.480 it's made up word, it's meant to represent some sort of lung disease, but it's not 08:02.480 --> 08:08.880 the thing that actually exists, and I'm going to try and read it, give myself a sort 08:08.880 --> 08:16.360 of grip sheet to do it with, but I've also linked to the spoken version of it on Wikipedia, 08:16.360 --> 08:22.400 which incidentally I disagree with at no time. The way I pronounce this is numano, pertaining 08:22.400 --> 08:31.440 to your lungs, ultra microscopic, very, very tiny, silico relating to silicatious dusts 08:31.440 --> 08:42.040 and stuff. Volcano, relating to volcanic ash, coniosis, numano, ultra microscopic, silico, 08:42.040 --> 08:49.720 volcano coniosis. So I think this is made up for a quiz or something. He wrote, I applied 08:49.720 --> 09:00.240 the algorithm of turning it into a um, umronim, and it turns up with p43s. So here's my 09:00.240 --> 09:04.760 conclusion then, numano nims don't appeal to anyone, you already gather them. Not with 09:04.760 --> 09:09.480 standing my little jokes above, I know the proposal is not to replace all longer words 09:09.480 --> 09:14.480 with them, this would cause chaos. However, as a means of denoting long words, this seems 09:14.480 --> 09:20.840 wrong. I assume that their evolution occurs like this, we use a word often in a particular 09:20.840 --> 09:26.360 context. The word is long and not easy to type, the sake of speed, and to avoid typographic 09:26.360 --> 09:34.360 errors, we make a numonym, we tell the world that I 18n, as an example, means internationalization. 09:34.360 --> 09:38.120 Those in the know have no problems with it, but many people are encountered later and 09:38.120 --> 09:44.560 counter it later, puzzle over it, as I'm doing here. It seems fair to say that this obscure 09:44.560 --> 09:49.880 process has fulfilled the need to abbreviate this awkwardly long word in the limits of 09:49.880 --> 09:55.080 the context where it's evolved, and it's not conveyed information very well. It has 09:55.080 --> 10:00.240 mainly benefited those who write or read documentation relating to the context. It's hard 10:00.240 --> 10:05.960 to split it, especially the thing. Many editor-in-word process replications have the facility 10:05.960 --> 10:11.800 of expanding abbreviations like this in my experience. I use them all the time, and there's 10:11.800 --> 10:20.520 an abbreviation command where you can say, use this sequence of letters to signify this phrase 10:20.520 --> 10:26.520 or word or whatever, and I've got loads of them. That's a very nice plug-in, which does a really 10:26.520 --> 10:33.160 good job, so I can point you to if you're interested. I'd rather use this than embed the 10:33.160 --> 10:40.520 coded abbreviation into the language. On the other hand, I'm okay with the new mobile 10:40.520 --> 10:49.720 thing being replaced by P43S, so I must just be absolutely not a people, but I must confess that I had a similar 10:49.720 --> 11:00.360 reaction to XKCDs exercise in using limited number of words to explain things. He did a thing called 11:00.360 --> 11:09.960 upgoer 5, which I blinked, which explains the Saturn 5, which he says is explained, using only 11:09.960 --> 11:16.520 the 100 words people used the most often. He might disagree with me about what I'm saying here 11:16.520 --> 11:22.680 if you're free to add a comment to this show or indeed record a show of your own. And in my 11:22.680 --> 11:29.880 links, I have included all this stuff that I've mentioned, and also one of my favorite fake words, 11:29.880 --> 11:37.080 which is the Welsh village, which I used to be able to pronounce very, very, very long, and it's 11:37.080 --> 11:46.680 abbreviated to L64H. I'm not going to try and pronounce it. I can do it if I give myself enough 11:46.680 --> 11:53.000 time to run up to it, but I've been there, and one of the, it's quite a nice little village in 11:53.000 --> 11:59.800 the north of Wales on the island of Anglesy. You go into the station, you can buy a platform 11:59.800 --> 12:06.600 ticket, just a thing that used to happen. You want to get on a platform to wave by to people, 12:07.400 --> 12:14.680 and it's extremely long because it's got the entire name on it. And this name was created in order 12:14.680 --> 12:21.400 to get more tourists visit apparently. So, which, you know, the problem? It's the second longest 12:21.400 --> 12:28.280 place name in Europe, might be, the world. I don't know, check the Wikipedia page I've linked to. 12:28.280 --> 12:35.720 Okay, that's me then. I've finished, and looking forward to any feedback you might have. 12:35.720 --> 12:36.840 Okay, bye. 12:39.320 --> 12:44.280 You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org. 12:44.280 --> 12:48.440 Today's show was contributed by a HBR this night like yourself, 12:48.440 --> 12:52.200 if you ever thought of recording a podcast, you click on our 12:52.200 --> 12:59.560 contributally to find out how easy it means. Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by 12:59.560 --> 13:06.120 an onsthost.com, the internet archive, and our synced.net. On the satellite stages, 13:06.120 --> 13:26.120 today's show is released on our creative comments. 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